Trump acknowledges and makes partial excuses for those embarrassing tax returns- but has a lot of 'splain' to do!

President Trump- who has an excuse for most things- says that his record business losses were at least partially a "sport-" depreciation on real property, a commonly used tax shelter.

Fine. But that doesn't do much more than begin to explain his reported $1.17 billion in losses between 1985 and 1994. Of course, the losses did permit him to avoid paying any taxes at all for eight of those years.

Part of the way he managed that is his use of a legally dodgy strategy to avoid paying millions in personal income taxes, improperly exempting hundreds of millions of dollars in canceled debt which according to IRS regulations should have been reported as income. Effectively, he avoided paying taxes by using other people's money!

Mr. Trump's lawyers told him that there were at least six reasons why the IRS would likely object. It should come as no surprise that his returns are under audit by the IRS! In fairness, though, he broke no laws which existed at the time and the IRS regulations were sufficiently ambiguous to provide a justification of sorts.

Mr. Trump's main defense is a familiar one: he blames Hillary Clinton for not stopping him! In fact, then-Sen. Clinton did subsequently vote for a law which explicitly banned the maneuver. Mr. Trump apparently faults her for not doing it fast enough.

Mr. Trump's supporters, of course, will defend all this as simply savvy business practices. They will dismiss the legal and certainly the ethical issues involved. And no doubt it's a good example of the kind of practical shrewdness which his supporters have crowed about ever since he announced his candidacy. But it's also a good example of the kind of legal and ethical  brinksmanship (to be charitable) which has caused those of us who were not blinded by the messianic aura Mr. Trump managed to project to so many disaffected and often poorly-informed voters.

Will the New York Times and Washington Post revelations hurt him? Probably not. Yet once more we're confronted by the phenomenon he himself bragged about during the primaries when he said that committing murder in broad daylight wouldn't cost him any votes. His core will explain away anything and everything, and the much larger number of more sensible and reasonable folks who have been swept up in the Trump movement out of political convenience remain in his corner will just sort of not notice it.

Perhaps some voters will be affected by this stuff. But I have a hunch that the Iowa farmers and Michigan auto workers who supported him in 2016 but whose personal lives have been adversely affected by his policies will play the decisive role in turning him out of the White House. The 2016 election was something of a fluke;  in 2020, I doubt that the margin by which the voters reject him a second time will be close enough for the mistake to have any chance of being repeated.